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Scientific American: The Do-It-Yourself Supercomputer

"...The first PC cluster was born in 1994 at the NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA had been searching for a cheaper
way to solve the knotty computational problems typically
encountered in earth and space science. The space agency needed a
machine that could achieve one gigaflops--that is, perform a
billion floating-point operations per second. (A floating-point
operation is equivalent to a simple calculation such as addition or
multiplication.) At the time, however, commercial supercomputers
with that level of performance cost about $1 million, which was too
expensive to be dedicated to a single group of researchers.

One of us (Sterling) decided to pursue the then radical concept
of building a computing cluster from PCs. Sterling and his Goddard
colleague Donald J. Becker connected 16 PCs, each containing an
Intel 486 microprocessor, using Linux and a standard Ethernet
network. For scientific applications, the PC cluster delivered
sustained performance of 70 megaflops--that is, 70 million
floating-point operations per second. Though modest by today's
standards, this speed was not much lower than that of some smaller
commercial supercomputers available at the time. And the cluster
was built for only $40,000, or about one tenth the price of a
comparable commercial machine in 1994.

NASA researchers named their cluster Beowulf, after the lean,
mean hero of medieval legend who defeated the giant monster Grendel
by ripping off one of the creature's arms. Since then, the name has
been widely adopted to refer to any low-cost cluster constructed
from commercially available PCs. In 1996 two successors to the
original Beowulf cluster appeared: Hyglac (built by researchers at
the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory) and Loki (constructed at Los Alamos National
Laboratory). Each cluster integrated 16 Intel Pentium Pro
microprocessors and showed sustained performance of over one
gigaflops at a cost of less than $50,000, thus satisfying NASA's
original goal."